How Long Does It Take to Learn Russian?

For an English speaker, reaching a professional level in Russian takes about 1,760 hours of study, according to US government figures. At an hour a day, that's nearly five years. That's a high bar, though. You'll read Cyrillic within days, manage simple conversations within months, and speakers of other Slavic languages start well ahead.

What the official figures say

The US State Department publishes how long its staff usually take to reach a professional level (a score of 3 on the ILR scale). Russian is in Category III, which the department calls "hard languages":

Language	Category	Typical training time	Class hours
French, Spanish	I	30 weeks	About 690
German	II	About 36 weeks	828
Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Turkish	III	About 44 weeks	1,012
Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin	IV	88 weeks	2,200

A typical week there is 23 hours in class plus 17 hours of self-study. So 44 weeks of Russian comes to about 1,760 hours in total, half the time of Arabic or Japanese and about a fifth more than German.

What that means for you

Study per day	Time to 1,760 hours
30 minutes	About 9.6 years
1 hour	About 4.8 years
2 hours	About 2.4 years

Please don't let those numbers put you off. The State Department's students train to work in Russian, full-time and with professional teachers. The department also says the time varies with ability, earlier language learning and time in class. A self-taught learner may need longer per level, but if you want to travel, talk to family or read Chekhov with help, you need far less.

What comes first, and what comes later

This order comes from how the language is built, not from a study.

Stage	When to expect it
Reading Cyrillic aloud, slowly	Days. Many letters are familiar, and our alphabet guide shows each one
Greeting people and introducing yourself	Early on. Russian has no "a", "the" or present-tense "to be", so Я студент (I'm a student) works from week one
Simple sentences in the present and past	Weeks to months
Choosing the right case ending without stopping	Many months, and longer for the plural
Feeling which aspect to use	A long time. It comes from exposure more than rules
Reading a classic with a translation beside it	Sooner than you'd think, since the translation carries you
Fast speech and reading without help	Years

Who gets a head start

The official figures are for English speakers. Nobody publishes them for other first languages, but some advantages are clear.

• Ukrainian and Belarusian. Russian's closest relatives, with much shared vocabulary and grammar.
• Polish, Czech, Slovak and the South Slavic languages. Cases, aspect and many roots will feel familiar. Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian speakers also know Cyrillic already.
• Languages with cases. If your language has cases, like German, Finnish or Turkish, the idea won't be new, even if the endings are.
• English. You get international words like телефон and проблема once you can read Cyrillic, and little else. That's why Russian sits a category above German for English speakers.

What takes the longest

• Cases. Six of them, with different endings for nouns, adjectives and pronouns, in the singular and the plural. Start with the accusative and prepositional, then the genitive.
• Verb aspect. Я читал книгу (I was reading the book) and Я прочитал книгу (I finished the book) need two different verbs.
• Verbs of motion. "Go" depends on whether you walk or ride, and whether it's one trip or a habit.
• Stress. It isn't marked in normal text and can fall anywhere, and unstressed vowels change their sound.

We look at all of these in more detail in is Russian hard to learn?

What speeds you up

• Study every day. Cases and aspect stick through repetition, not one long session a week.
• Listen from the start. Audio teaches you where the stress falls better than any rule.
• Read early. Begin with short texts, then books at your level. Here's which Russian classic to start with.
• Choose a target. The TORFL exam, a trip or a book you want to read in the original gives the hours a direction.

Start today

You can begin right now with our free Russian grammar lessons and word lists with audio, with no account needed.

Our Learn Russian app takes you from the alphabet through graded reading to Pushkin, Chekhov and Dostoevsky, with a translation under every line. It's free to download, though some books and extra content need diamonds you earn while learning, or Premium.